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[quote=Anonymous]Our longtime nanny has been with us since our older child (now just turned 4) was an infant and has always been very good. She's dependable, very loving, and all around awesome for the older one. Additionally, she also has taken care of us during her free time. She does our laundry, picks up around the house during nap time, and is generally very flexible and available for us (we both have jobs that sometimes require last minute addition of hours. We've trusted her enough to even go away for a few days at a time alone and to stay with our older one. She is hardworking, loves our kids, is incredibly honest, and is a great presence in our home. Until recently.
However, things have gone downhill recently. It started gradually before the baby was born. We noticed she wasn't picking up and responding to the older child's emotional needs well (trouble with toilet training, instilling some ideas in her we didn't agree with), but since these were minor and DS was going to be in school about 20 hrs a week this year, we decided to keep her on. 
Since we've had the baby, nanny has been amazing with baby. He lights up when she enters the house and she is just awesome at caring for him the way she was when our older one was little.
But things have really gone downhill with her and our older DS. She sometimes openly acts like she prefers the baby, leaving our sensitive older one to somewhat pick up on this and not want to be alone with her. DS has told us nanny gets mad at her (I think its more just raising her voice but still this isn't a perception we want our 4 yo to have of an adult consistently)! She isn't really choosing age appropriate activities for him (taking him to baby events with kids that are much younger) and generally somewhat ignoring him.
We're having such a hard time deciding what to do because she has been so great for so many years and the things with older DS are hit or miss (some days are still really good but the 5-10 bad ones in the last month or so are really upsetting us). We've talked to her a few times now about this and it just doesn't seem like its getting through- I think partly due to language but also because she just has a different philosophy about dealing with kids than we do at this older age.
So my question is, have others been through this? How did they handle it? I've started interviewing other nannies halfheartedly but I'm skeptical there is anyone out there who is really great at infant care but can also engage our older one in an appropriate way. If we had infinite resources, I would just hire a college student to pick up the older one from school in the afternoon (around 1) but we don't and frankly, we pay our nanny well- probably about 55k gross, so don't have more money to throw at this. Does anyone have a nanny who is good for both age groups? We're totally willing to part with the whole housekeeping/laundry aspect of her job too. Its really just the flexibility thats important to us.
Thanks.
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